Vote: Is The FHSAA XC Limit Of Five Meets Too Much?

If you want to compete in the state series for cross country you must run a minimum of five meets. The FHSAA Athletic Directors Advisory Committee recently denied the recommendation to drop the number of required contests to four and this has some coaches fired up and talking about it on our discussion board.

"Rules should not be implemented that are not able to be adequately monitored," said user CoachGCracker. "As we all know five meets is difficult especially if you are training properly, have freshman joining the squad late, have a rain out, hurricane, and sickness, ACT/SAT testing and a million other things."

He added that being in a uniform at meet counts for completing the requirement which makes it difficult to police this.

"If you can't regulate it why do we have the rule," he noted. "The ethical people (the majority) will follow rules, fill out waivers, etc. but why not change the rule to an enforceable one if we are going to have it at all."

Ed Thompson who serves as the the FHSAA Director of Athletics and Track & Field Administrator feels the rule is in place so that everyone can have an equal playing field.

"It's clearly for everyone's benefit," he said. "We expect our coaches to be ethical and teach/model ethical behavior. What I would like to know is how can we legitimately go about ensuring compliance in an efficient manner--meaning results/participation reporting that isn't onerous for all involved? This is a question that cuts across all individual sports in the association, not just track and cross country."

Do you think five meets is too many? Vote in our poll and comment in our discussion and let us know!